Books & Boss

After the execution last week of two of the late great Nikolai Lenin's closest friends and collaborators, Zinoviev and Kamenev, together with 14 others (TIME, Aug. 31), the Ogpu commenced a thorough search through the Soviet State Publishing House, the Moscow "House of the Book" and the State Institute of Soviet Encyclopedias. Envisioned by the secret police was the possibility that some of the heaviest tomes, reference books and general literature published by the Stalin Dictatorship and read by the whole Russian population may have been insidiously salted with "Trotskyism" and opposition to Stalin.

The Ogpu hunt was spurred by the suicide fortnight ago of Mikhail Tomsky, who had headed the Soviet State Publishing Monopoly. Last week Moscow papers blared that this organization had been discovered to be a "nest of Trotskyists." As in every bureaucratic nest which is probed, amusing facts and fumbles were soon discovered, perhaps the most hilarious of which was that a favored book reviewer, the pet of his Soviet chiefs, was paid for reviewing Soviet Communism by Lord & Lady Passfield the fantastic sum of 3,500 rubles ($700), probably an all-time record for reviewing one book. The manager of the Social and Economic Division of the Book Trust, Comrade Tardyi, and a number of his executives were dismissed for "harboring Trotskyists."

Up & down Russia mass meetings were held last week at which Soviet speakers called for the arrest and execution of everyone tinged with the faintest anti-Stalinism. The Dictator was cheered by 100,000 Russians gathered to celebrate Aviation Day.

Not many years ago the original Bolshevist Politburo which ran Russia after the Revolution consisted of Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rykov, Tomsky and Stalin in approximately that order of importance. After Lenin's death and the ousting of Trotsky, the ruling Soviet triumvirate was for a time Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev. Zinoviev and Kamenev have now been shot, Tomsky is a suicide, and Alexei Rykov last week was under investigation by the Ogpu as a possible Trotskyist. Thus the entire original Bolshevist hierarchy has now been replaced by Stalin, the man against whose rise to power Lenin explicitly warned Russia in his will.

According to reports last week this alleged final plea was dispatched to Stalin by Zinoviev and Kamenev: "We want to work as simple convicts where life is the hardest. We want to live to serve the great ideals of the great Stalin. Therefore, we beseech you to be merciful and give us your pardon."

Instead, the 72 hours supposed to intervene before their execution was cut to 24, and it was revealed last week that Stalin additionally refused a plea for clemency made to him by the widow of Lenin. Also refused was the appeal of the Second (Socialist) International, and last week these most official and impeccable of European Socialists were hotly denounced by the Dictator's press with the imputation that their sympathies are "Fascist."

In thinking radical circles all this appeared distinctly odd. In Paris last week up spoke Comrade Boris Suvarin, onetime secretary of the Moscow Comintern, one-time director of the Paris Communist paper Humanite who lost his job for criticising Stalin. "The real reason behind all this," said Suvarin, "is that Stalin wishes to establish a reign of terror which will strike at all important [new Russian] leaders threatening his power--for example, Soviet Premier Molotov. ... At the trial of Zinoviev and Kamenev not the slightest fact was brought out against the accused. . . . They were tricked into unproved confessions by promises that their lives would be spared. . . . Ivan the Terrible or Peter the Great would not have done more."

In Norway last week local officials called on Exile Leon Trotsky, offered to permit his stay in Norway until mid-December. Their one condition was that Comrade Trotsky submit to being virtually cut off from communication with the outside world in order to guarantee no plotting.

Later Trotsky called on the Ministry of Justice. There it was arranged for him and Mrs. Trotsky to be "interned" in Norway under heavy guard while his two secretaries were compelled to leave the country. Eight Norwegian policemen took up posts around the Trotsky home and the telephone operator refused to handle Trotsky calls. The Exile thus appeared safe from molestation as Moscow dispatches reported numerous Soviet meetings at which there were murmurings that Trotsky ought to be kidnapped and rushed to Russia for a Stalinist lynching bee.

The Norwegian Labor Party was reviled by Izvestia of Moscow which declared: "Instead of fulfilling their duty before the international proletariat and preventing the Fascist mad dog Trotsky from creating his terroristic plots against the Soviet Union, the leaders of the Norwegian Labor Party prefer to send out the lethal gases of hypocritical lies to cover up the trails of Trotsky and his helpers in Norway."

Sitting tight, the Norwegian Labor Party same day received the following from U.'S. Socialist Party Executive Secretary Clarence Senior: "We deplore dis-unifying action of Soviet Government in conduct of recent trial and in rejecting request of Labor and Socialist International and International Federation of Trade Unions for representation at trial.

"Because of Leon Trotsky's long and worthy services to labor, impossible to believe that he is implicated with Fascist terrorists. We support demand for hearing by an international labor commission and call upon labor to defend his right of asylum."

Interviewed, Trotsky said: "Stalin, the bureaucrat, has killed the Bolshevist Party. . . . From now on all opposition will be called 'Trotskyists' and 'Trotskyism' will be the excuse for retaliatory terrorism. Death sentences will replace prisons and concentration camps in Russia. Thus the new Soviet Constitution, called by Stalin 'The Most Democratic in the World' will be introduced. Stalin represents what is now the privileged ruling class in Russia, whereas I wish the proletariat to enjoy what the October Revolution achieved. . . . Stalin is trying to stifle in blood all opposition."

These were the kindling words of a Grand Old Revolutionist and in Russia the entourage of Stalin redoubled their efforts. A "nest of Trotskyists" was discovered in the Soviet State Bank, another among the astronomers of the Leningrad Observatory, and two Red Army division commanders were arrested as "Trotskyists." The spirit of Leon Trotsky seemed to stalk through the Kremlin Palace after Joseph Stalin this week like Banquo's Ghost.

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